I Told a Credit Card Phone Scammer Where to Go and Here’s How I Knew

Technology is making phone cons more convincing —learn to recognize the signs

My ex-wife C was over at the house, temporarily relieving me as the adult in charge of watching our son play online games. She’d just arrived when she got a phone call.

“No. No. Definitely not. That wasn’t me.”

As someone who’s had my identity stolen twice — I’ve since stopped using my Social Insurance Number as my Instagram handle — I recognized the sound of a bank or credit card company calling with bad news.

C is an anxious person to begin with and as the call progressed, her face started to furrow and implode with concern. She put the phone on mute.

“They’re saying some suspicious charges have gone through on my Visa.”

By this time she was on the verge of tears. She started walking up the stairs to distance herself from our son, and motioned for me to follow.

Upstairs in my office, she unmuted the phone while I stage-whispered “Put them on speaker.”

The person on the other end had a high-pitched voice, an unidentifiable accent, and a wheedling, bullying, tone that made me want to punch him in the face.

“Ma’am, ma’am, we just need some information from you. If you can confirm your credit card number…”

I looked at her and mouthed “Scam”.

She raised her eyebrows. I motioned towards the phone, and raised my own brows in the universal signal of “Do you mind?”

“Hi,” I said. “I’m C’s husband.” No point in providing unnecessary detail about our relationship. “We have questions. If you’re calling from the bank then you have all her information. I don’t understand why you’d be asking for it.”

“We just need confirmation, sir. You can see the number I’m calling from is your bank number.”

That was indeed the number on the call display. The operation was more sophisticated than I’d expected. That said, I’ve worked in banking technology for the last two-plus decades so it didn’t impress me unduly.

“Anyone can spoof a phone number. I could do that.” Actually, I couldn’t, but I really wanted to drive the point home and also look cool in front of the scammer.

I continued. “So we should call the bank number from my phone, and ask them to confirm what you’re telling us.”

“Sorry sir, I need to know right now, so we can decline the charges or put them through.”

Ah, the fake urgency. Any lingering doubts I’d had about the griftinesss of the call vanished. I continued because I was curious to see how far this guy would take it.

“The cardholder is here, and she is telling you to decline the charges. Just do that.”

“Sir, I have to confirm some information. Otherwise she will be responsible for the charges.”

“Bullshit. I’ve worked for banks, she will absolutely not be responsible. What information do you want?”

I had to grudgingly admire the weasel-voiced dude’s commitment to his craft.

“Just to confirm the credit card number.” He started to read a series of digits. I looked at C and she shook her head that no, the numbers weren’t correct.

This would be the point where the mark is supposed to jump in and correct him with the real number. We did not. I didn’t see much more entertainment coming from this increasingly enraging conversation.

“Thanks. We’re just gonna call the bank and check with them. Fuck off and have a nice day.”

I poked as hard as I could at the hangup button, missing the days when I could have slammed down a heavy receiver with a satisfying crash. I loathe these scum who prey particularly on the vulnerable and the trusting.

We called the bank, where an agent with a normal courteous way of speaking assured us that they had not contacted C, and that there were no mystery transactions on her account.

A couple of takeaways to avoid being a victim:

Thanks to technology, the phone cons are getting ever more convincing, so it’s reasonable to assume any call is a scam until proven otherwise.

• No financial institution or government department should ever call asking for sensitive financial or personal information. If they need to validate your identity, they should be doing it with data points like your birthday or email address. Never, ever provide account numbers or other confidential info to a caller.
• The scammers already knew C’s name, bank relationship, and email address. There’s a lot of information for sale on the dark web these days and just because a caller knows something about you doesn’t mean they are who they claim to be.
• Don’t trust what you see on your call display. Even if it shows the number of your financial institution, tell the caller you’re going to hang up and call back.
• If the caller says that you have to take action immediately or suffer some disastrous consequence, that’s a flag redder than Joe Stalin’s pyjamas.

The scammers are persistent, as we found. There are rarely repercussions for them as they’re generally offshore and the cost and effort of pursuing them aren’t worth it for law enforcement. In the unlikely event they’re caught, individual agents won’t be prosecuted, and even when one of these operations is shut down, another one will pop up somewhere else.

Be careful out there.